by Michael D. Wynne
Many great authors are often known as great authors based upon their accumulated published works. Authors like James Patterson, Stephen King, Nora Roberts, and Michael Crichton will likely be honored and best remembered for their total body of works rather than their specific titles. It is challenging, if not impossible, to write just one or two books and expect to become known and honored for all times based on this limited work. But we have one such author in CenLa that meets, and actually exceeds, this criteria and that is the late Elaine Brister of Pineville. Here is her remarkable story.
Faustina Elaine Holmes Brister (1905-1998) has a proud Louisiana heritage. The granddaughter of legendary north Louisiana Baptist Reverend Lewis Napoleon Holmes (“the man with a thousand smiles,” 1856-1926) and the daughter of prominent Pineville and CenLa area citizens James and Mary Elizabeth (Beall) Holmes, Elaine was raised
proudly in the Baptist faith. Elaine’s marriage to Commodore Webster Brister, Sr. (1892-1935) ended in tragedy when he was crushed by a gravel truck that he was catching a ride on in Pineville. They were the parents of two beloved children, three grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
Elaine was a graduate and former associate professor of history at Louisiana College (now LCU). She obtained her Master’s degree in history from LSU and did post graduate studies at the University of North Carolina and Wisconsin. She was an honorary member of Delta Kappa Gamma. A live oak on the approach to old Huey P. Long Memorial Hospital in Pineville is named after Elaine.
Elaine was a lifelong devotee to education and was elected as the first female member of the Rapides Parish School Board in 1952. As shared to this columnist by her nationally-known author granddaughter, Ann Bausum, “My grandmother’s opinion of the Supreme Court decision on Brown V. Board of Education regarding integration into schools was that this judgment was to be respected and implemented. Her fellow school board members did not universally agree with her and she eventually lost her position. Time has proven that my grandmother was right.”
Like her late husband and other family members, Elaine was devoted to the First Baptist Church in Pineville where she taught Sunday school and conducted leadership ministries for over 60 years. She died in Fort Worth where she was then residing and is buried with her family at Greenwood Cemetery in Pineville. Bausum said of her grandmother, “My grandmother came from a long line of strong women. She certainly exemplified that same strength. She also had a well-honed sense of what was fair and just and she passed those qualities down the female line with equal determination.”
Elaine authored two books, the important, “Once Upon A River,” the definitive history of Pineville and nearby communities north of the Red River, and “The Joy Of Discovery,” a journal of missionary biography. “Once Upon A River” is quite a remarkable book, particularly of its time. This Pineville history book’s origins began in 1947 when Elaine selected this topic to fulfill her requirements for her Master’s degree.
Published in 1968 and bearing a title suggested by Elaine’s daughter Dolores, the book also contains information that is sadly no longer available today. More importantly, in that prior age of limited historical resources and no internet, Elaine had to interview an estimated hundred people and had to manually turn thousands of pages of the Town Talk newspaper in the newspaper archives to find the needed information that she wanted. Note that the larger city of Alexandria has no such equivalent historical work (yet) on the city’s history.
Elaine H. Brister was a one-of-a-kind lady, loved by everyone who knew her and still is admired today, almost 30 years after her death. This book is both Elaine’s legacy and a book that will be read for many centuries to come.
